World Mental Health Day: When the body struggles, the mind feels it

In a large review published in 2025, drawing on 376 studies and almost 350,000 people, roughly four in ten adults living with chronic pain also passed the threshold for depression or anxiety. When the body struggles for long enough, the mind usually feels it.

For anyone living with a rheumatic condition, a long recovery or pain that will not let go, that will come as no surprise. It wears on sleep, on energy, on how you feel about yourself. The body and the mind were never keeping separate accounts.

The more encouraging finding is that it works both ways. When researchers pool the trials on physical activity, the effect on low mood and anxiety comes out on a par with therapy or medication. Getting a body moving again, gently and regularly, lifts something in the mind as well, even when easing the mind was never the aim.

Movement is only part of it. A good deal comes down to calm: a stretch of warm days where you are not holding everything together at once, where meals and structure and the small decisions are handled for you, and where the people around you know where you are in your recovery and carry some of the weight you usually carry alone. The mind gets room it rarely gets at home.

This is not treatment for the mind, and we would not call it that. But on World Mental Health Day it is worth saying plainly what guests often tell us on the way home: they are sleeping better, the days feel lighter, they are easier company for themselves. Looking after the body, and being looked after while you do it, has a way of reaching further in than you would expect.

Sources: Aaron et al., JAMA Network Open 2025 (ca. 39–40 %), and British Journal of Sports Medicine